External-facing staff need a way to collaborate with their organization's internal teams to support their engagements with external entities such as customers, suppliers and partners. E-mail messages can be forwarded, and recipients may receive a message by virtue of their e-mail address being in the “to,” “cc,” or “bcc” field.
Internal collaboration tools (e.g., Slack) exist to conduct private internal discussions within an organization. One drawback of these tools is that they do not allow private internal discussions to be conducted in association with an external email conversation that is made visible to all the parties in the private internal discussion. For example, an external contact (e.g., a customer) may ask a question of an internal point person (e.g., a supplier's customer relationship manager for that customer). The internal point person then communicates with internal team members to collect the information needed to answer the external contact's question. Once the internal point person has the answer or the requested information, he or she then sends an e-mail to the external contact to answer the question. Thus, the internal point person is required to perform an information brokering role, which reduces the efficiency, speed, and effectiveness of communication of responses to the external contact.
Thus, there is an ongoing need for solutions that improve communications between external contacts and internal point people and between internal point people and internal team members.